There was a violent pull on her arm, and she cried out, choking in the process. She started coughing water harshly. She had run out of time, but her arm was still being yanked, and suddenly it was free. Strong arms gripped her around the waist and pulled her up. She broke the surface and gasped, taking in great gulps of air, until she had caught her breath enough to start wailing with fear.

"Shh...it's okay...don't cry, Misty, you're safe now..." Her savior, her sister Lily, held her baby sister in her arms as she tread water, stroking Misty's hair comfortingly. She had seen Misty from the shore and had come to her aid without her realizing it, the horsea marking the location where Misty had gone down.

The horsea danced around long enough to see that Misty was okay, then ran away, scared of the new human. Lily continued talking. "It's alright, I need you to calm down, we need to swim back to shore...shh, there now, you're okay..."

But the damage had been already been done.

***

"You didn't drown?" Ash asked in surprise, and Misty let her head fall into her hands in exasperation.

"No, Ash, I'm lying. I did drown, and I'm not sitting her and talking to you right now," she said sarcastically. Ash's face turned red.

"No, I mean...uh..." he stuttered. "That was dumb. Never mind."

Misty rolled her eyes and grinned. "You're such a nut."

He shrugged self-consciously, then looked at her. His gaze was different than any other time, his face a mixture of disbelief, sympathy, and astonishingly enough, pride. "Do you mean you're scared of water now?" he asked. "And you still want to be a water pokémon trainer? I never would have thought..."

"No, of course I'm not," Misty said cheerfully. "Come on, Ash, you've seen me near an ocean. I adore water." Ash gave her a perplexed look, like he couldn't figure out quite what she was trying to tell him.

"I'm confused," he said.

"That doesn't take much," she retorted, and he smiled slightly. Then she turned serious, and after a moment, explained.

"Yes, I was scared after that. I was scared of water for almost a year. You can imagine how hard it was for me, living in a water pokémon gym. I quit the swim team. I begged my sisters to cancel their water shows the first few days after that, because I didn't want to lose them. They refused, of course, and told me that I needed to get back in the water, but I wouldn't. I...I screamed every time they tried to bring me anywhere near the pool, and they didn't have the heart to actually force me to go in," she admitted, blushing slightly. But she had been right—Ash wasn't laughing at her. He looked like he felt sorry for her instead.

"After a while they didn't try to make me do anything, though they still kept encouraging me. And I still liked pokémon, and since most of the pokémon we owned were water type, I couldn't hate them, despite my fear. I would go visit the ones we owned, as long as they were in the small holding tank instead of the big pool. And I liked to watch them on TV, and I dreamed of being able to one day have my own water pokémon show. I wanted to believe that by the time I grew up I would just have outgrown my fear."

"Is that all? Are you saying that it just got easier as you got older?" Ash asked.

"No," she said, and started giggling at the expression on Ash's face.

"I don't think I understand the moral to this story," he said dryly, and she laughed again.

"Well, I'm not finished yet," she said. "The way I was avoiding water all the time, I would never have outgrown it. I had to learn not to be scared."

"And how do you do that?" Ash asked. He was listening to her intently. She got the impression that he was trying not to act too interested, just concerned about his friend. But it didn't work, and she knew she was doing the right thing by talking to him.

"Well...believe it or not, I had another near scare," she said. "Do you remember that storm about five years ago? It was the worst one the meteorologists had seen in years. It was a...oh, what did they call it? I learned it in school." She frowned at the recollection. "Um...it was a gale, if that means anything to you. The winds were really strong and it was a really hard rain. A lot of towns flooded. Do you remember?"

"Yeah. My mom made us stay in the bathroom for three hours that night because she was afraid there would be a hurricane," Ash said. "We played Spit all night." He grinned and Misty rolled her eyes.

"You and that infernal card game," she said. "Well, anyway, Cerulean City was one of the places that was badly hit. It flooded some of the streets and knocked down trees and everything. Afterwards a lot of people went out in rescue teams. My sisters and I were a part of this, and we helped the people who were looking for pokémon that had gotten lost or injured during the storm. And we were assigned to the river.

"I didn't want to go near it, but I was too worried about the pokémon to refuse. And I did help. Most of the pokémon were wild ones that the storm had only spooked. Though I did find a hurt rattata and took it to the temporary PokéCenter, and I also found a lost growlithe. We knew who it belonged to because it was wearing a collar. It was actually that day that I caught..."

She paused. This and her near drowning were the two worst parts of the story for her to relate. But Ash was still watching her, looking as if he needed her to continue, so she just took a few deep breaths to calm herself and pressed on. "Well," she said, "I'm ahead of myself. The next pokémon I found was an eevee who had crept down to get a drink of water on the other side of the river. The eevee was really dirty, and I couldn't tell if it was hurt or not. The problem was I had no way of reaching it. Until I looked farther down the river, and there was a tree that had been knocked over by the storm. It bridged the river enough that I thought I might be able to use it to cross to the other side. But I never made it. So I never reached the eevee, either—I've worried about it since then. But I just had to hope that either it was okay, or that someone else found it."

She swallowed nervously, and Ash fidgeted, knowing this was hard for her. "I...it's hard to believe I actually had the courage to do this now, but I was really worried about the pokémon, so...I tried crawling over the log, but it was slippery from the rain...and I...I slipped...I fell in..."

"It scared you," Ash said softly.

"You'd better believe it did." She gave a shaky laugh. Even though she was over it, whenever she thought about that day she still remembered her fear. She couldn't stop here though. This was the most important part.

She looked Ash in the eye and said, "I was so scared that I couldn't move at first. It was like the fear took hold of my mind and I knew I needed to do something, but I couldn't. I just knew that I was going to drown, and I didn't want to fight something that I couldn't escape. It was almost like I was a spectator, you know? I was so disattached from myself that I just sat back and waited for it to happen."

Ash was perfectly still, staring off into the distance uncomfortably. He squirmed once, then dropped his hands in his lap. He felt like he should say something, something to encourage her or tell her that he understood, but the words wouldn't form themselves in his throat. But Misty knew what was going on in his mind. She gave him a moment to think, then continued.

"But luckily, I wasn't alone. Though I didn't know at the time that I was about to find a friend...well, anyway, I felt something poke me and right afterwards my arm started stinging. That startled me enough shake me out of it and I swam to the surface, though I still didn't know what to do. I was terrified; remember, it had just rained, and the river current was stronger than it usually was. But when I drifted I managed to catch hold of a rock that was sticking out of the water. When I looked at my arm, it was bleeding. Something had scratched me.

"I looked over and there was a Goldeen flapping towards me. At first I thought it was trying to attack me—what with its horn scratching my arm and all—but then it went limp, right there in the water, and the current carried it straight into me. And I mean, it slammed into me. I was so startled that I automatically let go of the rock to catch it, and as soon as I had my arms around it, it started swimming. It had tricked me into letting it carry me and brought me right up to the shore. I couldn't believe it had saved me without even knowing who I was; it just knew I was in trouble and it could help me. Of course, I knew couldn't let a pokémon that special get away," she said, smiling. "I had done that once with Horsea. But I wanted Goldeen to stay with me forever."